As you may know, WordPress is built using PHP. This programming language is incredibly flexible, but it also has a few drawbacks. For example, if you don’t allocate enough memory for your WordPress installation, you might start running into the occasional “PHP Memory Exhausted” error.
In a nutshell, this error means your server isn’t allocating enough resources for WordPress to execute the PHP scripts it needs to function properly. This issue can negatively affect your site’s functionality, but there are several ways you can fix and even prevent it.
In this article, we’ll show you how to fix the memory exhausted problem by increasing your PHP memory limit. However, first, let’s talk about how to recognize this error and what it means!
Why You’re Seeing a WordPress Memory Limit Error on Your Site
As we mentioned earlier, the PHP memory limit error means you’re not allocating enough resources for your WordPress installation to function correctly. The problem usually presents itself with a message such as:
Don’t be scared by the word “fatal,” though. Your website isn’t broken, but you will need to make some changes to your WordPress installation if you want it to work properly. Specifically, you’ll want to increase your PHP memory limit.
By “PHP memory limit,” we mean the amount of server memory that’s allocated to run PHP scripts. By default, that number should be around 64 MB or higher. In most cases, 64 MB is more than enough, however.
Most hosting servers provide you with far more memory than that, so increasing the PHP allowed memory size shouldn’t negatively impact your website’s performance whatsoever. In fact, unless you’re using a cheap web host or you set up WordPress manually, your PHP memory limit shouldn’t be an issue at all.
You can easily check to see what your PHP memory limit is by accessing your WordPress dashboard and navigating to Tools > Site Health > Info. Next, you can click on the Server tab and look for the PHP memory limit entry.
Within the Server tab, you can also check other information such as your PHP version and the PHP time limit. The latter variable, which is in seconds, defines how long PHP scripts have to execute before they time out.
For now, let’s focus on the PHP memory limit. As you can see, the above example has quite a high limit, which means that the website is unlikely to run into a WordPress Memory Exhausted error.
If your site has a low memory limit [